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Unforeseen

UNFORESEEN

UNFORESEEN is an adventurous, multidiscipline collaboration between musicians, artists, academics and audience. The content and structure of each day will be informed and shaped by the outcomes of the preceding day*.

UNFORESEEN takes place across four lunchtime sessions at Hidden Door 2015 in Edinburgh. The sessions last from 1pm-1.45pm.

All four events are free to attend but reserving your free place is recommended to avoid disappointment – see eventbrite link. Reserving for more than one day is encouraged as it is an evolving event format.

Barriers between performer, medium and audience will be challenged, as will the nature and context of collaboration, inspiration, creative methods and time constraints.

The outcome will be an emergent process with each part contributing equally but unpredictably towards a coherent, dynamic whole, exploring key themes in the evolution of art and culture at the intersection of sound and sight.

The format of each day will involve an exploratory workshop between resident artists and a new guest expert from diverse fields. The results of each workshop will be presented during a public event at Hidden Door.

At the event, a facilitator will lead a wide-ranging discussion and audience Q&A based on the presentation, which will involve input from invited documenters who will also record the event as they see fit.

The facilitator will distill the discussion by considering the issues and ideas raised in relation to the overall theme, Unforeseen, and brief the resident artists and new guests for the following days workshop.

At this point the process will begin again

FACILITATOR

Martin is a senior lecturer and program director of the MSc Sound Design program at the University of Edinburgh, artistic director of the Dialogues Experimental Music Festival,and director of outreach at Edinburgh College of Art.+ Read more

He has a PhD in composition and recently used his four month curatorial residency at Talbot Rice Gallery to exhibit ‘gap in the air’ which aimed to bring technicians and curators together with artists and audiences in order to examine the challenge of sound in gallery spaces.

RESIDENT ARTISTS

Sun. 24th - Wed. 27th May

‘I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of things; in the visual vocabularies, narrative qualities and emotive associations of ubiquitous objects.+ Read more

The interaction between people and material culture has become a recurring area of enquiry in my artistic practice; how we look, how we read visual language, how we make sense of our material world and how the stuff that surrounds us becomes us. I am intrigued by the provenance, meaning and power of objects and by the forces of materialism, marketing, consumerism and obsolescence. Through the language of ‘stuff’ my work attempts to examine the relationship between artist, object and viewer and to challenge the conventional notions of authorship and consumption, thinking, making and creating.’

He is interested in creating new contexts for experimental sound practices. Through the creation of immersive and interactive audio-visual environments he explores synaesthetic experience, interactive systems and creative multichannel audio diffusion.

Charlie’s work under the name Trudat Sound & Light makes use of unconventional multi-speaker set-ups and reactive visualisations.

His compositional process is informed by interaction and improvisation. The systems he builds react to incoming sounds (‘sonic gestures’) by generating new ones (‘sonic reactions’). The performer has control over the sonic gestures. The result is partly composed and partly unpredictable, depending on the degree of randomness built into the system. In practice this leads to music that balances hyper-dense percussive passages with complex evolving ambient textures. Everything is related and any given moment in a piece is the result of everything that has happened before it.

Augusto Di Scipio has been an important figure in the development of Charlie’s approach. Di Scipio’s writing on the concept of the performance ecosystem provided a theoretical starting point for Charlie’s experiments and in some way resonated with my interpretation of club culture, where distinctions between performer, instrument and audience are already blurred and are ripe for further distortion.

GUEST ARTISTS

Mon. 25th May

JL Williams’ first collection, Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011), was inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a journey to the Aeolian Islands.+ Read more

Her second collection, Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), explores the idea of home and where we come from, and was nominated for the 2014 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award.

She has been published in journals including Magma, Stand, Poetry Wales, Edinburgh Review and Fulcrum. Her poetry has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Polish, French and Greek. She plays in the band Opul and is Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Catherine Street’s work consists of layers of experience: she often incorporates her own body into an installation setting that has video, audio, drawn,+ Read more

sculptural, and written elements. The atmosphere is usually unnerving, tense, sensual, comical. Intense breathing sounds give the viewer the feeling of moving inside the lungs, the body’s cavities – whilst her writings often describe a desire to break apart the flesh and return it to its constituent elements.

Street focuses on her body because of its multitudinous natures; on the one hand simply matter subject to physical laws, and on the other a potentially limitless field of meanings: social, political, sexual, spiritual. She pays particular attention to themes of transformation and to the relationship between matter, thought, emotion and sensation.

Catherine Street is an artist based in Edinburgh. She has made work for performance festivals and exhibitions around the world including in Prague, Bergen, Berlin, Wellington and New York. She collaborates widely, maintaining long-standing collaborations with poet JL Williams and with composer and performance-maker Greg Sinclair. Her most recent project is a solo show at the Reid Gallery Glasgow School of Art – on until 30th April. She has contributed to a number of publications, most recently the Modern Edinburgh Film School anthology Queer Information.

GUEST ARTIST

Tues. 26th May

Jessica Ramm gained her BA Hons from Duncan of Jordanstone in 2009 and her MFA Contemporary Practice from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014. Her research consists of a series of ongoing, sometimes+ Read more

haphazard experiments that examine contemporary civilisations ordering of nature through technology and science. Using her body to test the mobility and resistance of matter, she constructs performance videos and sculptural installations that manipulate the environment. Recent exhibitions include: Earth Rise, Tramway, Glasgow (2015); Remote Possibilities, Timespan, Helmsdale (2014); Convocation, Glasgow School of Art (2013); Leave the Capitol, The Fleming Collection, London (2013).

As part of UK Innovate grant-funded collaborative research project, Ann Marie is currently working on defining the requirements for vivid learning experiences that link directly to the national curriculum, with a particular focus on ‘hard to teach’ topics.

My responsibilities involve the design and implementation of the course curriculum along with the student experience and their educational development.

Further to this I am a 3D and Research Methods lecturer on courses including; Advertising, Interaction and Interdisciplinary design at postgraduate level and the undergraduate programmes in Product, Graphic and Interior Design.’

AUDIENCE DOCUMENTATION

More resources including reflections from the artists can be found on the Project Space site.